If you run a WordPress site you have probably contemplated already at some point whether or not you should implement the hot new Google AMP for mobile. We had the same dilemma here at Kinsta and ended up testing it for a while. In the end, we didn’t see good results and it ended up hurting our conversion rate on mobile devices. So today we are going to dive into how to disable Google AMP on your blog, and how to safely do it without 404 errors or harming your SEO. Simply deactivating the AMP plugin alone could end up really harming your site, so be careful. The good news is that both methods mentioned below don’t require a WordPress developer and can be done in a few minutes!

What does Gutenberg bring to the future of WordPress? In this article, Leonardo Losoviz shares a number of implications of building sites through a component-based architecture (as the concept) and through Gutenberg (as the implementation), including what new functionalities it can deliver and how much better it can integrate with current website development trends.

For the absolute majority of web creators, including myself, WordPress is the one and only platform for creating websites.

The market domination of WordPress over other CMSs has become a commonly known fact.

There was just one factor lacking in WordPress: the need to code every small change.

This is not only true for WordPress. Up until recent years, building websites has been a developer-led field.

With WordPress, the ‘code-first’ approach can be seen in its ‘Code is Poetry’ tagline, as well as in the way in which themes are customized. Making changes to a theme either required the designer to hire a developer, or learn development skills on her own.

One day, we had a serious drop in our conversion rate and started digging in our web analytics tools to find the source of this drop. It took quite a while before we found out that our checkout did not work properly since the previous software deployment.

This was the day when I started to do some research about automating our testing process of web applications, and I stumbled upon Selenium and its WebDriver. Selenium is basically a framework that allows you to automate web browsers. WebDriver is the name of the key interface that allows you to send commands to all major browsers (mobile and desktop) and work with them as a real user would.

When you stop trying to over-optimize, you should notice considerably fewer variables in your template files. I recommend that you take that idea a step further and try to avoid variables in template files in general. Not because you should avoid variables themselves, but because of what they’re a symptom of in template files — logic.

While some logic will always be necessary, you can improve the readability of your template files significantly by removing as much as you can.

Google has invested heavily in shaping the architecture of the web, working with developers, the open-source community and the SEO community to ensure adoption of technologies and practices as part of its mission “to contribute to the prevalence of a healthy, flourishing, and vibrant web.”

Most recently, Google has partnered with open-source content management system (CMS) WordPress, arguably the largest, with market share nearing 59 percent and an estimated 1/3 of all web content published through the platform — including our three publications.

For many years, we’ve invited folks to tell us how they use WordPress by filling out an annual survey. In the past, interesting results from this survey have been shared in the annual State of the Word address. This year, for the first time, the results of the 2017 survey are being published on WordPress News, along with the results of the 2015 and 2016 survey.

So that information from the survey doesn’t reveal anything that respondents might consider private, we do not publish a full export of the raw data. We’d love to make this information as accessible as possible, though, so if you have a suggestion for an OS project or tool we can put the data into that allows people to play with it that still protects individual response privacy, please leave a comment on this post!

. I’m sure you’ll find at least a couple of them here that you’ll end up using regularly.

Note; Sorry, but we couldn’t find the authors of some of these cheat sheets. For most of them, though, you can find the author’s copyright clause + a link to their site at the bottom of the cheat sheet.

WordPress cheat sheets

“Coolness”? This is our own rating to indicate how cool we think these cheat sheets are.

Big companies like to bury unpleasant news on Fridays: A few weeks ago, Facebook announced they have decided to dig in on their patent clause addition to the React license, even after Apache had said it’s no longer allowed for Apache.org projects. In their words, removing the patent clause would "increase the amount of time and money we have to spend fighting meritless lawsuits."

I'm not judging Facebook or saying they're wrong, it's not my place. They have decided it's right for them — it's their work and they can decide to license it however they wish. I appreciate that they've made their intentions going forward clear.

We could all use a little levity in the IT world (especially if you lived in the path of Hurricane Harvey).

Aurich / Getty

HOUSTON—I had enough to worry about as Hurricane Harvey plowed into the Texas Gulf Coast on the night of August 25 and delivered a category 4 punch to the nearby city of Rockport. But I simultaneously faced a different kind of storm: an unexpected surge of traffic hitting the Space City Weather Web server. This was the first of what would turn into several very long and restless nights.

Space City Weather is a Houston-area weather blog and forecasting site run by my coworker

KeystoneJS is a content management system and framework to build server applications that interact with a database. It is based on the Express framework for Node.js and uses MongoDB for data storage. It represents a CMS alternative for web developers who want to build a data-driven website but don’t want to get into the PHP platform or large systems like WordPress.

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Although WordPress can be set up by not so technical users, KeystoneJS offers the control needed for professional ones to develop new websites—although it is still considerably easier to work with KeystoneJS than manually building your website from scratch. It not only offers a platform to build websites; you can replace almost everything on it and develop more specialized systems like applications and APIs.

Trust us, you don’t want Google to hate your website. Fortunately, you can reduce your image’s file sizes to help improve your website’s performance. One problem with formatting them is that modifications often reduce their quality (which in turn might make the visitor hate your website). That’s not a bad thing as long as you don’t make them ugly. There are some tricks and techniques that let you reduce the image’s file size and still keep them pretty enough to proudly display them on your website. So let’s take a look at how to format your images without making them ugly, as well as how to optimize images for web and performance

Consumers typically have their own experiences when it comes to web hosting and their own opinions. If you search Google for reviews for any web hosting provider you’ll find dozens of results. Usually, there are a lot more negative reviews than there are positive ones. I thought I would flip that around and share some WordPress hosting challenges from the perspective of the WordPress host and how I frequently solve them.

I have compiled a list of bad web practices and recommendations on what not to do on your site, based on thousands of hours of customer interactions, support tickets, and troubleshooting I experience on a daily basis. Some of these range from beginner mistakes to more complex issues. A lot of these can be the difference between having a successful WordPress site and a failure. Picking the right web host is very important. But your decision also goes hand-in-hand with educating yourself on how to best optimize your WordPress site.

Contributors began by summarizing the criteria for evaluating framework options, includes factors like stability, longevity, maturity, adoption, accessibility, proven in a WordPress context, and extensibility, among others. Most of the discussion centered on the benefits and drawbacks of React vs Vue.

The majority of those who participated in the meeting seemed to favor React, as it is already used with several major WordPress projects such as Calypso, Gutenberg, and Jetpack. WordPress’ project lead, Matt Mullenweg, has publicly stated that Automattic is betting on React long-term. Mullenweg has also

For some unknown reason, the number of “WordPress Developers” out there is probably nearing the number of Java developers, despite of the fact that all Java developers do program extensively whilst the WordPress developers far too often have no idea what’s going on behind the admin panel.

I do conduct interviews on a weekly basis for various reasons, and over the past couple of years I’ve probably shortlisted over 700 applications for WordPress development. The original article was written late 2015 and updated in April 2017, adding up to a few hundred interviews on the way – both locally, virtually, and by telecommuters interested in joining our team or any of the technical teams led by our ongoing retainer clients.